Old school marketing worked very differently than inbound marketing currently does. You could spend as much as you wanted to put an ad on a billboard, place a spread in a magazine or newspaper, or create a 30 second TV commercial. The problem is you had no definitive knowledge about how many people were exposed to your advertisements. Even worse, you had no idea about how many of the people that were exposed could be a potential customer of yours. This has all changed with marketing online because we now have the ability to base all of our actions on data. We know how many people have seen every CTA and landing page. We know who opens emails and when. We even know what pages people have visited on our website and what keywords they typed into Google to get there in the first place. The point is every aspect on inbound marketing can always be improved with some intelligent analysis. By following my eight steps for optimizing your marketing assets, you will be able to ensure that your content has the best possible conversions. Stay tuned for Part 2.
1) Think Big Picture
As Stephen Covey relentlessly recommended, we should always begin with the end in mind. Your end goal is not to drive more traffic to your website. It is not to have a perfect conversion rate on your TOFU offer, and it certainly isn’t to create the world’s best landing page. Your goal is to produce truly Sales Qualified Leads for your sales team. So your first step should be to analyze the campaign as a whole. What is the goal of this particular campaign? Does it have all the supporting elements in place, i.e. content, landing page, thank you page, CTA, workflow email, social promotion? Take a few minutes to understand how your campaigns have fared in the past, so you will have a solid grasp on where you stand right now.
2) Time To Analyze the Call-To-Action
If your goal of this campaign is to get someone to download an offer, you must spend some time looking at your CTAs. There is a good chance that most of your leads will be exposed to your offer through a CTA. Because of this, you need to make sure that each call-to-action is engaging, image-oriented, and had a clear message. Remember, this CTA is indeed a call to action, so make sure that action is easy to understand and complete.
3) The Landing Page Will Be Your Offer’s Face
Every piece of premium content your business has, i.e. eBooks, whitepapers, presentations, etc., should have a corresponding landing page, and that page will act as the gatekeeper for this piece of content. Ideally, you show aim for a 5-15% submission rate on each of these. That would mean that between five and fifteen percent of the people that make it to this page decide to fill out the form. For those that aren’t familiar with typical web traffic patterns, this may seem excessively easy to attain. For those seasoned industry veterans, used to dealing with large amounts of web traffic, you understand how difficult this can be.
If your landing pages aren’t converting at this level, you can start asking yourself the following questions: Does your landing page have a clear and action-oriented header? Does it clearly explain the purpose and the value of your offer to someone who merely glances at the page for five seconds? Does it use bolding, bullets, and numbering to help make the purpose easily digestible? Do your visitors not have to scroll down to understand why they should download the offer? Is the form readily visible right off the bat? If you answered no to any of these questions, you may want to consider making some adjustments to your landing pages. Doing so should help you increase your conversion percentages and guarantee you are properly packaging your valuable content.
4) Not All Forms Are Created Equal
Your next step, to ensure that your marketing assets are optimized for the best possible conversion rates, is to analyze your form. Every landing page has a form. Along with a lack of top-level navigation, the inclusion of a form is one of the key components that make a page a “landing page.” The entire purpose of that page’s existence is to do one thing, convert the viewer into a lead by convincing them to fill out the form.
There are a few questions you should ask yourself to make sure your forms are up to par. To begin with, does your button text use clear actionable language like “download” or “register” instead of generic language like “submit.” Are the form length and requirements appropriate to the value of the offer and the amount of other text on the page? You probably don’t want to require ten different form fields for a top of the funnel offer, but you also probably don’t want to only ask for a name and email address for a bottom of the funnel conversion. Be sure to consider the form length and requirements when building out any landing page to make sure you aren’t overly intimidating to new leads or are under-qualifying prospects for your bottom of the funnel conversions.
I know some of these tips might seem complicated or tedious, but this line of work is not for the faint of heart. It is for the dedicated employee who wants to get the most bang for their company’s inbound marketing bucks. The beauty of this work is that you will be able to track your progress the entire way. You will be able to see if your efforts paid off, and if you followed these first four steps in addition to the final four I will post in my next blog, you will certainly start to get more conversions from your marketing assets.
To learn more, please check out Part 2 of this series. If you would like to talk about this strategy or anything else relating to inbound marketing, please take a tour of our website, or you can feel free to contact me directly at adoggrell@revriv.com.